the turquoise ether magazine’s mission is to publish independent critical reviews of promising artists from over The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)

Turquoise #9 — Jenya Stashkov (Russia)

The spirits and souls of animate objects populate Jenya Stashkov’s drawings, elaborated with exquisite detail in color and black and white, in what one might describe as refined delight. The young Russian has lived in St. Petersburg for most of his life but now plans to leave his native country for London and perhaps beyond. The artist aptly identifies himself as a mystical artist whose embrace of ahimsa, (Sanskrit: “noninjury”) in the Indian religions of Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, expresses the rigorous ethical principle of not causing harm to other living things. This no doubt is part of Stashkov’s motive for departing his beloved homeland at this tragic time.

Stashkov’s sympathies seem to embrace an Oriental mysticism with a primitivism familiar to modern artists as varied as Picasso and Frida Kahlo. I see a lot of his artistic impulses in Kahlo, which suggest the universal impulses behind folkloric traditions. The pre-modern traditions that attracted Kahlo may be similar to what attracts Stashkov; in both Mexican and Russian traditions one sees evidence of a gaiety and joyousness of the sort the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin celebrated. Primitivist surrealism is perhaps an apt summation of the artist’s vision.

I was immediately taken by Stashkov’s weird figures which one might see as forms of merriment or a kind of phantasmagorical brocade. Abstract they are not. His lines may be delicate but they are not what Francis Bacon’s once sneeringly dismissed as spools of yarn. Stashkov is no Jackson Pollack. We are much more in the world of the carnival, with elaborations of dancing, or floating culturally identifiable spiritual amoebas. They combine elements, as Bakhtin once found in Rabelais, of a “feast of beans,” “a concert of cats,” or in the imagery of our America’s poet Wallace Stevens, an empire of ice cream. Figures that are delicate, playful, innocent, and childlike. Yet, his is not an accidental art, such as the surrealist’s upturned toilet, but a scrupulous one, not found but made, like paintings by Chagall.

Art that seeks to delight without grave pretensions. His drawings bring a smile to the faces of their onlookers while eschewing an impulse toward ideology which was so much a part of 20th century surrealism in the West. A great painting such as “Nude Descending a Staircase,” for example, might be one strain of Jenya Stashkov’s artistic heritage, but I suspect that if painted by him, that nude might have one leg descending while the other ascends, and Stashkov would never insist on the figure requiring a staircase at all. Why not a star? Why limit the nude to being male or female when he or she could be one or the other or both? Why bother making him or her human; couldn’t the figure be a bumble bee or a stingray? Jenya Stashkov comes out of a tradition of art that seeks the playful, and rejects the static. He is a product, I should say, of the Russian fairy tale, a world of sprites, fairies, goblins, and angels.

May 14, Tokyo

David Lohrey